Floppy drive not responding

[Guest]

I am currently setting up a new system: KT7 RAID, 1GHz TB, 40 Gig Max HD, Asus 7700-Deluxe GeForce2 GTS, SB Live MP3+5.1, HP 8100i CD-R/RW. I don't plan on utilizing RAID at this point.

Unfortunately I can't see how slick this system will be since I can't even format the hard drive. The KT7 doesn't seem to be working properly. At first I thought I had a bad FD, but I changed both it and the cable out with one from my other system and that didn't fix it either (cables were installed and seated correctly).
Sometimes the system will lock up on "Verifying DMI Pool Data...", but most of the time it tries to read the FD in order to boot and I get the following message;
"Disk I/O Error; Replace the disk and press any key"


I tried many different BIOS settings and also tried removing all cards but the video card and FD. It wouldn't boot from the floppy. I got the same error message. I tried booting with three different boot disks, no luck. I tried these same disks in my other system and they worked fine.

One odd thing did happen early on in the process. My system booted once from the floppy and I was able to partition HD, or so it seemed. Then I rebooted the system since it hadn't recognized the HD and wouldn't allow me to format it at that time. 300 reboots later and I cannot get the board to read from the floppy.

Is there something simple I'm missing...or is the FDD connector on the board bad? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Andy

 

[Guest]

Hi Andy, my thats quite a system you're putting together there, sounds great. I am a tech with a computer shop in Australia, I have been working with PC's for 13 years. I have seen a similar thing with an FIC board while trying to set up a Thunderbird CPU. Whenever you get a problem after the message "Verifying DMS Pool Data", this indicates a hard drive boot-sector problem. Does BIOS Auto Hard Drive Detect see the drive OK? And is the setting for Floppy Drive A set at 1.44MB Floppy? Try connecting the drive to the secondary IDE channel and run the Format command again, if all works simply swap it back to the Primary and see if the system re-boots, if not, you may have a suspect IDE channel?
Good Luck Mate

 

[Guest]

Whoops, of course that should have read "Verifying DMI Pool Data", HA HA my bad typing ;-)

 

[Guest]

I'm having the same problem with a FDI AK-74 mobo and Tbird, though I was fortunate in that the HD I'm using already had everything loaded.

The thing is, isn't it possible to boot from the CD ROM by changing the BIOS boot device? If you have a Windows CD, can't you use that to boot and then just forget about the floppy (just disconnect it so that the error doesn't even pop up)? That's my plan anyways.

 

[girish]

it might be a problem with the floppy. does it read the floppy for a while and let go?

try using another bootable floppy disk. better still, use the bootable win98 cd-rom and boot from the cd itself. you can set it so from the bios setup.

be sure you turn off the floppy drive from BIOS (set it to none) because win98 setup might wait forver (in other words hang) looking for the floppy drive that never responds.

girish

 

[Guest]

Just some basic questions which may help: Was your hard drive detected by the Award bios or by the High-Point bios? If you are connecting to the UltraAta100, are you using the 80-pin cables? Do you have the Primary connector connected to the primary drive and the secondary to the secondary? Is your cdrom on the secondary ide controller? If you are using 2 drives on one cable, do you have the drive jumpers set correctly? Is you floppy cable connected properly?